Philosophy, at its minimum, is the discipline of letting one’s commitments generate consequences one did not choose in advance.

“Implicit in all the attempts to fit the gay movement into various “more revolutionary” categories is the assumption that calling it a democratic rights movement or a reform struggle is somehow a defa­mation, a downplaying of its im­portance from the viewpoint of Marxism. Nothing could be less true. No one knows what will spark the next outburst of the class strug­gle. The overthrow of the Haile Selassie government in Ethiopia (a movement forward, regardless of one’s assessment of the present re­gime) followed a traffic stoppage that occurred when a taxicab driver in Addis Ababa parked his cab in the middle of the main thorough­fare to protest high gas prices. Two days later 100,000 demonstrated and four days later the government fell. The 1905 Russian Revolution was begun in earnest when Father Gapon led a peaceful march of 200,000 workers to the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar for such demands as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and the press, and an eight-hour working day. The portrait of the Tsar and church icons that headed the march did not prevent the Cossacks from fol­lowing orders and killing a thou­sand workers. The turning point in the Iranian revolution was the re­fusal of the Shah to heed the de­mands of democratic rights and economic reforms by the Iranian oil workers, who also marched un­der portraits of the Shah until they were fired upon.

"slime is the revenge of the in-itself [...] it transcends all distinctions between the psychic and the physical, between the brute existent and the meanings of the world; it is a possible meaning of being."

“It is wrong theoretically to equate the two tasks as if they were on the same level: “the task of preparing for an armed uprising” and “the task of leading the trade union struggle”. The one task is said to be in the forefront, the other in the background. To speak like that means comparing and contrasting things of a different order. The armed uprising is a method of political struggle at a given moment. The trade union struggle is one of the constant forms of the whole workers’ movement, one always needed under capitalism and essential at all times. In a passage I quoted in What Is To Be Done? Engels distinguishes three basic forms of the proletarian struggle: economic, political, and theoretical—that is to say, trade union, political, and theoretical (scientific, ideological, and philosophical). How can one of these basic forms of struggle (the trade union form) be put on a level with a method of another basic form of struggle at a given moment? How can the whole trade union struggle, as a “task”, be put on a level with the present and by far not the only method of political struggle? These are incommensurable things, something like adding tenths to hundredths without reducing them to a common denominator. In my opinion, both these points (the second and third) of the preamble should be deleted. Alongside “the task of leading the trade union struggle” can be put only the task of leading the general political struggle as a whole, the task of waging the general ideological struggle as a whole, and not some particular, given, modern tasks of the political or ideological struggle. In place of these two points mention should be made of the necessity of never for a moment forgetting the political struggle, the education of the working class in all the fullness of Social-Democratic ideas, and the need to achieve a close, indissoluble connection between all manifestations of the workers’ movement for creating an integral, truly Social-Democratic movement.

Our standard for evaluating the quality of reform cannot simply be to see how much the masses benefit, because there are differences between short-term and long-term benefits, between local and global benefits, and between superficial and fundamental benefits. In addition, we must also recognize that if the people do not have the power to defend their own interests, the existing welfare will not be preserved; and if the people do not have the ability to defend their rights, the existing rights will also be lost. Therefore, for their own welfare, the people must fight for their own power, and to fight for their own power they must cultivate their ability to fight for power. Among the three of welfare, power and ability, the most important is the ability of the masses to defend their own rights. Only with ability can there be power, and only with power can there be welfare. 

Writing through or about grief is a confrontation with containment, both in the self and on the page. It sanctions an inclination to digress, not only because revisiting is an organic and necessary part of the experience, but because it is an unstable state and subject, prone to a volatility that resists attempts to find forward motion or shape. There can be a holiness about the parenthetical, the cadence of interruption that affords you the scaffolding to approach a subject that feels dangerous. However, if you’re a writer and so obligated to the work of exclusion that brings an end into sight, it is a terrible crisis to be lost in that digressive purgatory. That shapelessness can be chronic, in part because it can feel, when there is no beginning, middle, or end, that there is no way out. Bereavement makes a mockery of borders and by extension narrative. It’s somewhat of a paradox, too, in that to engage with it is to engage with permanence — the foreverness of death, of grief — but also with what happens after death, whether those questions are spiritual or the practical problems of being the person who is still alive and tasked with the quotidian, like showering or deciding whether or not to stay alive. So it should be noted that grief is sometimes this, grappling with your own desire to die.